Negative Times Negative
by Marilena
Summary: The brightest light casts the darkest shadow. I forget who said that, but he must not have had a very happy life. Can I just have this moment? Rivamika/Mikariva/slight Eremika


A/N: This story contains a depiction of PTSD, depression and other mental health issues tied to the experience of war, losing friends and survivor's guilt. If these themes are triggering to you, please continue reading at your own risk. In any case, feel free to message me if you need company finding online resources for dealing with such issues. I will be glad to help.

* * *

Negative Times Negative Equals

* * *

My mother was a dreamer with secrets at her core making her tick like clockwork. She was the sort of person to tell her small daughter, Mikasa, before you give up, remember to put on the brakes and play with your mind. Just play with your imagination, explore your options, find your way out. When the men took us, lifted and twisted us around, I tried to picture them as big brown bears.

I played - I pretended we were the honey and the bears were slobbering with hunger and malice and something old and world-wise beyond my understanding. I pictured the door splintering open with a terrifying blast, the hunter stepping through. The hunter came, khaki overalls on Dad's slender form, his fingers quick on the trigger and his love spilling for us. The door opened and father saved us over and over and over until I forgot what he was supposed to look like, and I recalled what she looked like, dead.

Play with my mind, my mother said. How could I let her know playing with my mind had not worked, how could I ask for a different set of instructions? I lay orphaned. Piglet on a scummy floor, the arrow-shaped shapes of men falling hard on me. My fantasies curled up inside me. There were no bears, the men never took us.

They took me. I was the honey; lie still, honey, we won't hurt you, well, not us, not now, not much. Mom died and dad died, and so would I.

But then he came, the Hunter. A little hunter came for me and his and his father took me away. Did I somehow summon him with my useless fantasizing? Did I deserve to have him come true, come for me in flesh and blood, his eyes lit with an internal flame that warmed me better than his scarf?

I promised I would never again almost give up before playing with my mind.

But this magic trick never worked for me again.

* * *

Nothing gets written until you regurgitate the fragments of your life and arrange them on the page. Too many things have happened for me to just order them neatly and say this is done, now take it and digest it and know me. If I fill one thousand pages, maybe I will know me but you won't. So this is not for you but for me, in the present and in the future who may read this if I persevere. As for my past, it's me now. It's not nice, but it's me so I have to bring it here and lay it down bare. And maybe I even want to.

* * *

Last night I dreamt my room was underwater. Not too deep, far enough down that I could not break the surface of the water if I tried. Oh, but the starlight above could reach me. And how it did. It seeped into my bones, making me feel good and strong. Like the darkness of the water world was so that the stars would lay only on me, glowing particles of comfort as they were. Mikasa. Honey.

It was quiet enough. Not the sound of birds, or the swish and swash of underwater currents; nothing for the water to splash against - my room had done away with walls. A rising pressure in my ears as the bed sank into the sand, feeding the seaweeds that rose like dancing poles of green shadow to take hold of me. Out of the dark cluster on my arms came the head of Eren, swaying with the shadows, growing a torso with limbs and legs and arms and feet, longer than they had been and thinner and white like the belly of a great dead fish.

Eren was not belly up. He bore down on my shoulders, hovered over me unblinking. His fingernails, I could see, were sharp. This was my hunter, my family and he had come for me once again, to take me away. I tried to speak but only bubbles came out and, and Eren opened his mouth too, like he was in his titan form trying to keep me safe in his mouth but he was not and he looked at me like I was going to die. I had to die. I knew I had to die, after all I had already died once with him and Armin and everyone else, our violent deaths fresh in my heart. So would it bother me if this Eren tore me to shreds and carried me away with him in the shadows to dance into the nightmares of unsuspecting soldiers?

My thought of Armin summoned him. He sat on my shins and looked away from me, until I struggled and kicked hard enough to get him to turn his head. When he did, I wish he hadn't. Where his gentle probing intelligence once hid behind blue eyes, now two great eye sockets stared at me. Empty. They stared right past me and through me. I felt his fingers slither around my ankles and my peaceful resolution to let Eren take me wavered like the flicker of a flame. Don't open a second window. It's open now. This window led me down to where I was not sure I wanted to go, no matter how much I wished to burrow to the bottom. But I was helpless in my dream, as I am helpless now to stop thinking about it.

Sasha came from above. Her hair reached around and enveloped me twice around the torso, each strand cutting paper-like into my skin. My blood spilled openly, no secrets there. It seemed especially luscious in the moonlight, a thick glittery tar, art-and-craft like. The blood brought in the other predators, sharks and children with jagged teeth on giant heads and strong currents that tossed us around in the unnatural violence that nature sometimes reserves for the unlucky. They all started on me at the same time, and I screamed as Eren bit away my fingers, and my nose and ears, and Armin pulled until my legs came apart like seams on a doll, and Sasha finally slashed into me good, all the way through.

Then everyone came away with a piece of me and scattered into the corners of that harrowing dark nothingness where they resided. And for hours later, I was awake on my dry bed with tears streaming down my face, wishing I could go back to the nightmare and feed them more of me.

* * *

I am not so good at this orphanage business as Historia used to be. The kids themselves are not bad. They are all more or less grateful for the opportunity to grow up in shelter and relative normalcy. It's just that I don't know what relative normalcy is or how to create that environment. I can't find it in me to care enough about creating that environment.

Hanji provides me with enough opportunities to come across as the brave war hero that saved their little asses. She has me show them Life Skills, which is really just Watered Down War Skills We Hope You Won't Have To Use (But Shouldn't Die With Us) and we provide short history lessons we hope are not terribly biased towards Paradis on the grand scale of things. We teach them to read and write and forage and hunt and grow things, all of us grown-ups pitching in together to make it look as though these are the things we have been doing all along. Like we know what it's like to live the villager's life through and through. Like we have not taken enough heads to stack into the tallest mountain they could ever try to climb in their mended stringy shoes. We have some legitimate farmers and builders and such on the payroll. That's how we quitely learn what to do in the first place.

You can tell the veterans by the sloping shoulders, the creased brow. If you're sharing dorm space with one, you'll know all about the nightmares. Our words are quick, our glances furtive. Our romances failed. I try to keep quiet about it as I don't see the point in taking my scars and multiplying them with someone else's. I bet the only thing we'll get out of that is one giant monstrosity. So I go at it alone, and that's the plan.

There are two that seem to be adjusting well in our new enlightened peaceful period of bliss. At least no worse than before. Hanji is the adaptable type and too steady to fall into the trap of gazing morosely into her navel and shedding tears that could just as well go into a soup for the children and save on the salt. I can't begrudge Hanji her steadfastness or even her happiness if she were to find it. Hanji is different.

He is not different, though, he's the same rotten ilk as the rest of us. Can I justify to myself the act of hating someone for doing all right? For seeming content with a straw hat and a fishing boat and his eyes not growing harder as each day brings him closer to his flat-note end?

He should be feeling useless, out of place. An Ackerman war toy that was played with, broken, discarded. He should be plagued by his atrocities. He should feel like a one trick pony, one with a broken leg, the one to be put down because it's just kinder that way.

Why does he get to figure out how this works, while I am stretched thinner and thinner the wider the children smile, the louder the nightingales chirp?

It shouldn't be allowed.

I know this is beneath me.

* * *

I pray for the nightmare to return and scare me half to death near my loved ones, but it doesn't. Instead, I dream of Levi.

He tells me the secret to being happy is not being worthless. As he says this, he takes off his shirt, tosses it to the floor and steps into my space to clench me by the waist. He tells me I would not know what it's like to not be worthless because I let all of my friends die, and he didn't. He explains; he chose to let one of his friends pass, he chose it because it was kind, but he saved everyone else and look how well they are doing now. He grabs the side of my neck, and his grip is strong and hot, reassuring me that he is right. He is true. He looks up at me with some contempt and some charity, and I understand that what comes next is just and fair for me, and exactly what I need.

I unbutton my sleeping garments and slip off them myself, while he holds me in place and refuses to look at me. Is there a point in looking at me? No more daily training means I have grown softer despite working at the orphanage. I am just like any other woman in shape and feel, only my heart is dirtier. He knows this. There is no kissing, no bridling passion as he unbuttons his own trousers, turns me over against the wall and slides himself into me. It feels astonishing, like a bucket of cold water over a doorway in the scorching heat of summer. I sober up instantly. He slides one hand into my hair and one up my front, traveling over my stomach, not quite flush against the wall, and around my breast, and pulls both back. I arch like a bow whose string is being pulled, my knees bent low to allow him to come all the way in. I feel my skin tingle and he thrusts into me, each push and pull a small tidal wave, growing is scope, growing to a punishing pace that fills me with anticipation.

He grunts and growls low, infrequent, and I gasp as my face is pushed against the cold concrete and I am liking this, because it is not intimate and it is not happy and it feels good. Like he is cleansing me from the inside with some intense scrubbing, and he will go away after a job well done and leave me bare, sparkling, bleached blank. Yes, that is what it feels like, and he pinches my nipple and bites into my shoulder at the moment when his pelvis comes up to me in a sharp, painful twist. It makes me yelp and try to get away, only to push right back. And as he bites into me, I remember Eren biting into my face in my underwater prison, his beloved eyes glowing green and unblinking in a cypher too hard for me to crack. I remember. I remember I don't deserve to have this taken away by a hard fuck against a wall. I need to live it over and over and over until there is nothing for Eren and the others to take.

So I gather my bearings and reach over to push him off me. It takes a great deal of strength to break his hold over me, but I do. When I twist around, it is not Levi's grey scowl that I see but the small round eyes of a bear towering bony and bedraggled over me.

* * *

I must have looked at him too long or too harshly when he brought in the catch of the day, because he walked to where I sat knitting patches over holes in the blankets, dropped two wrapped fish on my lap and asked me how I was.

We don't usually talk, although we often exchange nods and pleasantries since there are no official hard feelings between us. So today was unusual. I told him I was fine, put my needles away to lift one corner of the newspaper and peak underneath; two silvery breams stared back. Vividly. So I thanked him for the fish, which was very nice indeed, and asked him how he was doing back, and he shrugged and said well enough.

But he looked better than well enough. A slight tan deepened the wrinkles branching out on his cheekbones. His posture was relaxed, his hair full and dark despite him nearing middle age, his eyes perhaps the calmest I have ever seen them. It felt as if he could smell some oddness in me. That feeling that someone is on to you - I suppose he has always had a gift for making you feel that way, cornered.

Yet I could not get a whiff of the accusation, the arrogance. The I Am Doing Better Than You. This real Levi had better things to do that punish failed ex-soldiers with his cock, and I think I blushed a little because what total fucking hogwash to be thinking right in front of a person!

My frustration showed. It always shows, it's rare enough that people have a reason to register it. That's what I think. Of course he noticed.

Of course he didn't comment on it.

I guess you don't live to be humanity's strongest and still breathing soldier without the sense to leave some messes alone.

* * *

Another nightmare tonight.

I don't want to do this anymore, I don't want to be devoured or to have to drag them on my back for miles as they bleed out only to die again or to stand alone inside a tree with the bark turned outside in and grating me raw with every inhale of breath-

I'm late for Life Skills.

* * *

Here's how to have a breakdown.

I start by shutting myself off from everything and everyone, including my journal for a few months. Maybe because I want to try not facing what little I've written in it, that I've pulled out of me in chunks and handfuls like hair down the drain.

I throw myself into work. I scrub the hardest, shovel the deepest, grin the widest when a kid whose name is Mark or Matt or most likely Martin brings me a potted sunflower. I forget it unwatered on my windowsill until it starts to wither, and then I notice one morning, feel bad, and decide a good sunflower is a planted sunflower. Where it has room to grow.

Carrying the plant to the herb garden by the orphanage's kitchen, I pass by the dining hall where Levi, Hanji and Connie are taking breakfast together. I nod at them and Levi's eyes travel down my arm to the half-dead sunflower. He has been bringing me fish sometimes, even asked me to join him on the boat once. Says it's nice out there, especially in the later evening and there is marked lack of wailing children too. I know Hanji joins him sometimes and other people too, and they go around the steep cliffs to the West and have little adventures there. He can be devil may care, but that doesn't mean I have to take charity from a fellow hypocrite. So I refuse his invitation but take his fish for courtesy's sake. And now he sees me with this neglected life form dangling by my side, in my care, and I see them in their ironed crisp clothes spreading marmalade on scones. I leave fast. The compulsion that takes hold of me is dizzying.

The sky is getting dark when I snap out of it. There is a hole in the ground that I have dug for my plant, but it is really a trench you could bury a boar and its extended family in.

I play with my mind, picturing myself climbing down into the wet earth, curling up and going to sleep. Somehow this does not satisfy me. I picture someone pushing me down into the hole. Kicking me down, landing on my face, my nose is bleeding freely and there are the shadows of many throwing rocks at me, the impact, the impact is-

-more than I can take. I kneel over my pitiful sunflower and cry. There is no hiding this crying, because it's loaded and angry. So am I. I am loaded and angry and I don't think for a moment that I deserve this punishment I have been doling out to myself like chocolate laced with hard drugs. And if the others can be content with all this peace and loss, this lack of voices and of the tension that kept us all alive before, it's their own faulty design. And if the plant needs water not to die, it's the plant's fucking faulty design, I will not be punished, or fucked over, I will be allowed to heal in my own way, if ever. So I seethe and rage in silence until I spot him behind me.

"Seems excessive," he says, coming near and looking down.

"It's fine. Exactly right," I tell him.

"Are we talking about the hole in the ground, Ackerman? Because that's just excessive. No two ways about it."

"How can you be like this?" I ask, wiping the tears away and smearing them across my face. It must look like war paint. He takes a moment to think it over. I can tell he is making an effort to not look at me directly. It rings a distant bell. I dislike it.

"I choose to."

He chooses to. Of course, he chooses to. Because it's that simple. Because he's strong and I'm not?

"No, I'm not buying that."

He sighs.

"Then because I have no choice."

"I have a choice," I tell him, turning my back to leave. "I choose not to pretend. You know, to be something I'm not. It never works out. But suit yourself."

"Mikasa," he says and it's like a cat testing a surface with its paw to see if it will hold. Past my shoulder, I see him staring ahead, his mouth flat. "We all have a choice. But our hand is forced. So in the end, it's like we don't have it."

I look at him like _'so?'_

A small smuffle of his feet, then he says, _"_ when we had the war, there was no stopping to smell the flowers. You'd have to be an idiot to learn to," he pauses, looks for the right word, gives up "... _like_ the world. When you are risking your neck day in and day out."

"Or it's simply that that was who we are," I point out the obvious. "Not that we couldn't enjoy these things, but that enjoying these things is none of our business." I want to say enjoying life is for noble souls and we are murderers, cold-blooded, and we have sacrificed our friends to draw these breaths. I almost say it but I don't, because haven't I just decided I don't deserve this?

"No, listen," he says, somewhat impatiently now. A strand of hair is falling right over his eyebrow, and I know this because he is looking at me now. "If you choose to be live by the seat of your pants, you can. Then life is a gamble and you're too high on it to notice you're sucking the energy out of the air."

"Oh, am I?"

"Or if you choose to find reasons to be fine with it all, now that you can stop and, I don't know, live until you drop dead for no reason other than you're past your expiration date -" he says, and then he he runs out of steam. Maybe because this is all, in fact, too much coming from a fellow killing machine posing as a kindly older uncle. But I know what he means. He means that if I want to, I can, as long as I make the switch.

"You are full of shit." It comes out as a savage little not-whisper, because my voice is stuck in my throat and won't come out properly. I am the only one swearing in a conversion with Levi Ackerman. What a time to be alive. And why won't he leave? He should just go away. "You should go away," I say, and immediately feel like a sulky teenager.

Before I can protest, or throw the potted sunflower squarely at his head, he has picked up the shovel and is working over the pit, filling up the trench.

"Let's plant this poor fucker, then I'll leave."

We work side by side. He is lithe and efficient, and nature has come to him like a unexpected lover later in life, after a painful breakup. If I could find it in me, I would be just a bit proud of him.

* * *

It starts out well, with sepia tones on the grass and our skins, and a cottage in the distance. Eren is lying next to me on the ground and in this dream - I know it is a dream right away - he is whole and sweet like a freshly baked tea biscuit. We play with each other's hair, tugging playfully, a giggle, a happy sigh. I roll him over on his back, straddle his waist and reach over to place a kiss on the side of his throat, underneath his ear where the skin is soft as peaches and he likes it.

In reality I don't know if he likes it, liked it, or at least I don't recall if I ever found out. But it not important right now. As my hair trails over his face, it tickles his nose and he makes a noise, tries to tickle my sides in return. I put his wrists over his head and hold them down lightly, and kiss his lips. Our hands entwine and he rubs small circles over my palms, and the kiss deepens. My longing is pouring out of me like a lost child following the crumb trail home, and he is home, his mouth is warm, and before I know it, I am pushing for more. But the kiss is sweet, it's innocent, and I'm not sure how to get what I'm asking for without breaking the spell. Nothing more uncertain than charting the unfamiliar with your most familiar person, nothing riskier. So I hesitate, and he stops kissing me and is content to just be that way, close enough, not entirely there.

This kicks off something in me, some chain reaction of volatile chemicals I can't put a lid on even if I try because I don't even know where it is. I am not content, Eren, I am more, ask more of me; I press into him again and this time I grind against his pelvis and sigh hard into his mouth, hoping he will take my lower lip between his teeth and make sure I feel it, the stake, the exploratory flag. He is not taking the bait, but he is indulging me decently enough with sweetness and consideration that makes me choke with guilty unhappiness. I want him to claim me. This is not enough, Eren, and I reach my hand to rub over his jeans and he's not entirely hard for me yet. Will he ever be? I need to know, there is no time to waste. There is already a low rumble in the ground, a rustle in the leaves. This world is disintegrating, Eren - so won't you join me? But he only seems a little distracted. And a little sad.

I unzip his pants and play with him, rolling back the skin and lapping my tongue over the head like a kitten, then enveloping him in what I know ought to be feel nice. Eren is quiet. We lock eyes. There is something there, an off note, a not-quite-rightness that infuriates me, and I try to make it go away until the sides of my jaw start to get numb. He stays only half-hard. It's humiliating. I know I decided this was a good idea that would fix everything, but he is disagreeing, non-verbally, in a way I can't argue with. Mortification, it's a feeling of rocks in the pit of the stomach and needles in the chest and hoping for the ground to crack gaping wide like a maw and swallow us both - there is a deafening rumble as everything shakes and it starts snowing fat yellow flakes- I look up -

I'm now blowing Levi Ackerman.

His lack of definitive expression is an expression in itself. There is a hint of smirk, one eyebrow is raised. Not so much curious as expectant.

"Well? Get on with it," he says, as he urges my head over his cock, and for a long moment, I do it, take it in. It's hard not to, when it's such a solid healthy thing, slick with moisture at the tip. Instinctively, I want to appease him. It feels so different than before, like there is a magnetic force pulling us close, me pressing down with my lips tight and him arching up at to meet me. He is not the right man though. With the right man it felt wrong.

Then the fact that the man underneath me is not the right one cuts into me like a whip. I let him go with a _pop_ and point an accusatory finger.

"You're not Eren. I don't want you." I'm not sure what I want to do with Eren at this point, but I surely pick Eren to be here instead of him.

"Too bad," he says off-hand. He brings his hands behind his neck, elbows turned out. "This is all you get."

Yellow snow lands on my bare shoulders, the tops of my thighs. It's tepid and breaks down into small unclean rivulets on my skin. And his. I run my hands absently over his abdomen, bunch up the loose shirt and lift it up. He is made up of many plains and valleys, highs and lows of stringy muscle and jutting bone. A sprinkling of soft, short hair down low, brown, darker than it should be. His arms are powerful but compact, sitting on his legs brings me closer to the ground than it should. A wider face, a wrong part, wrong eyes, very wrong. He is not Eren. How dare he not be Eren! It is an unintelligible cry that comes out me.

I slap him so hard across his smug face that his whole head spins to one side. He gives me the side eye as his cheek reddens, and I beat him on the chest with my fists, an enraged maiden with the strength of a brigade of men. I am hurting him but he does not stop me, so I hurt him more until I know I've started a future painting of bruised flesh on pale canvas. Still he does nothing. His eyes seem to be mocking me for this display of weakness and I will have none of that.

I rush to hover over his head, grab a handful of hair and sit on his stupid face so I can't see it. There is a persistent tug in my insides starting from where his nose is pressing against my sensitive nerve endings and spreading upwards and outwards as if on strings. He pushes my underwear to the side, angles himself and gives that spot a light tug with his teeth, an almost nibble that makes me slouch over like a doll, too unhappy to enjoy it, too desperate to keep it going, and he goes over me with everything he has - his hands and tongue and teeth and lips and stubbornness - as if to prove a point. That I am powerless to not want it. And that I can be manipulated like 3DM gear.

I ride the wave and the wetness and his burning brow with no regard to what is proper and good. A knot is unraveling in me and when the feeling plateaus, I surrender to my fate and bunch it all up to let it go at once -

But the dream finishes before I do.

When I wake up, my period has started.

* * *

Something happened today that I don't know what to make of.

I have been somewhat steadier this last couple of weeks, as if the ground is not always quicksand and my legs can hold me upright. Some of the older kids have noticed and tried to get cheeky with me, which I dismissed rather enigmatically to keep them on their toes. Hanji has surely noticed, which may be why I've been finding myself with not a moment to myself. And when Levi was about to set off on a half-day foraging mission, I felt the need to get out and about. Look under shrubbery, feel the breeze of a new place in my hair, pick a flower for my room perhaps.

When I said I'd go with, everyone was surprised, none more so than me. But there was no protest, only Levi nodding and Hanji handing me her best wide-brimmed hat and a pair of thick gloves. We left before noon and rode in silence for the better part of an hour, then tied our horses near a stream and entered the forest of giant trees. I have always enjoyed that place. It gets me in a reverie. A natural reverence of some sort. Most things that make us feel small have that effect. Even the titans were like malevolent deities sometimes.

So we walked for a while under the canopy of enormous hulking trees and then we reached a fork in the path, and picked the one going uphill. We paused there and he explained what we were looking for. It was mostly luxury items to spice up the kitchen, add colour and deepen the flavour of broths: hen of the woods mushrooms and morels, hibiscus flowers, wild sage, peppermint, marjoram. Levi was hoping for some wild tea like nettle and dandelion and raspberry leaf too. We set off to look, and at first I showed him what I thought was good, and he told me if it was right or not. Then I did it mostly on my own. Once, he told me to leave a particular cluster of morels alone unless I wanted everyone to snuff it with their breeches down past their ankles. That made me snort and leave the mushrooms to him, and I went over to a ripe blueberry bush and started picking it.

"Where did you learn all this stuff anyway?" I asked him. "Weren't you a city kid?" He was bent over a red leafy plant, handling its small white flowers between thumb and forefinger.

"Through hard work and dedication," he said. "And lots and lots of puking." He sniffed his finger, made a face, got up and away from the plant.

There are rich pickings in the forest this time of year. We did some picking and prodding and cutting and soon it was mid-afternoon. We stopped at a clearing where the sun filtered through the branches of the giant trees and made mysterious shapes on us, garments and faces in the half shade half brilliance. I sat against a rock, closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the forest. So alive and at peace with itself, despite its eternal violence, the everyday tragedies taking place in its depths. Breathe in, breathe out. Force a smile, until it's real. Breathe in, listen. This is real, I thought, and it's happening now. I allowed myself to relax and be carried away, and I think I did it with a real smile.

Sometime later, Levi shook me awake. I opened my eyes to see him crouching by my side, watching something in the distance. I was so open, relaxed from side to side like a morning stretch that slips deep into your bones, so in tune with the place and the time that all I could do was keep grinning at him.

"Come see something," he whispered close, a low current of air hitting my ear, jolting me more firmly awake. "We have a special visitor."

He took me to a place behind the brambles at the edge of the clearing. There was a deer. She had just given birth to a fawn and was pushing out a second one, both shiny spotted bundles with the most delicate of legs, the most perfect of ears. I was transfixed and so was he, his eyes very clear the way the sun was hitting them, a morning milky sky in each one. I asked myself, if I can find Levi Ackerman's eyes wonderful, does it mean wonder is everywhere you look, if you just know how to look for it. Or is that just romanticized bullshit?

Then the thing happened.

We both saw the bear step into the clearing at the same time, attracted by the blood. Maybe she even caught a whiff of vulnerability in the air like static. Animals are sensitive to that, just like humans. I scrambled for the rifle and backpack I knew we had left some paces away. The mother deer made a gut-wrenching whine, a terrible sound, leapt away from the feet of the bear and nudged the fawns to move, but the bear was hungry and quick and with her claws and jaws she caught one of the fawns and made quick dinner out of it. The mother deer and other fawn scrambled away, and as I pointed the rifle at the bea that was cutting into the flesh of the small animal, I noticed that Levi had not moved.

He was frozen in place, having a stare down with the bear over the blood and guts of the fawn. My heart skipped a beat. I had the bear in the crosshairs of the rifle but could not dare take the shot. What if I missed or my shot was just bad enough to make it go rabid and chase us down? I creeped up to Levi and tugged at his shoulder.

"Let's go!" I hissed.

Nothing. I pulled harder, dug my nails into him. Panic washed over me. Here was Levi, humanity's strongest, the bravest, most brazen men I knew, the only soldier that could best me at my best, an infuriating stubborn prat that refused to die. And he was in mortal danger and out of his mind.

"Levi, come on. Come on."

The bear's bloody muzzle pointed at us as the animal unfolded to its full height, disturbed by the closeness. Maybe it took offense that we had not taken the opportunity to step quietly away while it was busy with its kill. Maybe it thought we were little predators ourselves, after its meal. It certainly had an almost human glint in its eye, some dirty challenge for us. And there was Levi, feet still planted in the soft padded earth like a half-mad prophet expecting final judgement.

My instincts kicked in as I felt the bear prepare to charge. Fast and without much thought, I brought the rifle to my line of vision, centered, fired. I got it in the neck. Its blood spurted out in three jets, three different directions - I was hoping for a punctured artery - and then I grabbed Levi by the collar and pulled with all my strength and somehow we were running.

If we had had to outrun an enraged bear, we would have surely died on the spot. Two Ackerfreaks that lived through a world war only to be eaten by a wild animal native to their homeland. But really, all we did was run to the other edge of the clearing, climb over a small boulder and slide down the other side and straight into a ravine. The bear above did not follow. It probably bled out and died shortly after.

The ravine was steep and short and we landed in a heap it took a moment to get out of. When each of us was free of branches and all limbs were in place, he got up and started limping away.

"Yeah, about that," I said, blocking his path, "no."

A brief staring match. I'm not half bad at them.

"What was that sorry display about?"

He rolled his eyes and held out his arms to push past me. We struggled for a second, then he was out of my way, but I was determined not to let it end there. He was many things, but he had never failed to protect himself, or me, or any of us for that matter. Never could I see him as meal for a bear. The thought disturbed me deeply as though the sun had just set on the wrong side of the world. I could not let it go.

"Are you mad?" I asked after his back, and when he did not answer, "You are a bad troop leader!"

Levi turned sideways, jaw clenched so hard I thought it would break.

"Tell me one damn thing I don't already know," he said.

Then he limped on ahead, and I followed in silence.

* * *

Look, I did not realize it was like that for him. And what difference does it make? If we all take our scars and add them together and multiply them times themselves, we'll only get worse.

Having an invincible former troop leader show weakness is jarring, yes, but I can't not respect him. If I could, I would have found a way to rip my respect for him to shreds already. God knows I've tried. Maybe I even like him more now I know he's broken. There is something familiar in the structural disrepair, the rot in the foundation that rattles just as badly as mine.

I I won't feel sorry for him.

He's doing just fine.

Irony is that when I reached the orphanage and my dorm bed that night after the bear encounter, I slept like the dead. The next morning I was the most refreshed I've been in years.

* * *

Water can't carve rock in a day. It's not fair to either of them, or the eons of history that have set them up in their original position.

Surely, though, one day the new marks show up clearer. It's that day that matters. I wonder - is that any one day? Or does it have to be a specific one? A special, now-it-turns-over-for-you day? Because this day, if it starts like any other, how can I know it when it happens? I could be confusing the days, confusing myself. Some days this makes me anxious, that I could doing the wrong thing. Missing out on the marks of change showing clearer.

I've taken up running on these restless days.

* * *

It's one of these days.

I am past the point where my feet hitting the ground is uncomfortable. An intense tingling sensation has spread over me, starting from the soles of my feet, rising up my shins, warming my stomach, pulling at my shoulder blades, running free down my brow.

As soon as make the last sharp turn of the winding path and come up to the beach, I taste salt. The salt of the ocean air and my own sweat. I keep running down the steps of flat worn stone, all the way down to the sand. My stride is long, my hair is free and in the way. I don't care enough to redo the ruined ponytail. It feels like someone is offering me a hand and I want to reach out and take it, so I run and run and run some more until I can see that hand, touch it, hold it close to my heart.

This is not a dream. I know it is not a dream, because the sun is coming up behind that mountain top in a myriad different brilliant displays of divine gusto that I could never come up with myself. My subconscious only deals in fragments, never the whole picture. So I am running with the wind and the waves splashing by my feet, gulping down the air like I've been underwater a very long time. With every step, I land farther, faster than before, amazing myself, and I laugh, chuckle with abandon, until I lose with footing and collapse like a tower on myself, and I laugh some more. For just a moment, I not simply at peace; I am more. I have the tiniest bubble of happy something something deep inside me, beckoning me to pay attention, which I do. Really. My breath is taken away.

A little blue crab is peeking at me from underneath the rock.

"Not as crazy as it seems, little one," I say, offering it a stick to play with. "You should try some exercise too. You're looking mighty fat."

I knew a girl that would think of playing with you and then eating your delicious juicy insides, I think. Well, she had a few weaknesses like that, but she was a good girl. My friend. My friend who was alive like that, until she wasn't anymore, and I didn't know how much I'd miss her silly face and big brown eyes like half-moons filled with childish wonder and some deep down old wisdom I never had. But hey, at least I'm here. Living for both of us, right?

Right?

The bubble has burst.

I roll over in the sand, cover myself up, hoping it can get into the cracks of me and make me whole.

* * *

 _The brightest light casts the darkest shadow._

I forget who said that, but he must not have had a very happy life.

Hours pass, the whole day, and I can't snap out of it. After a while, I stop trying, it's pointless.

It's getting dark and the tears have dried. The only thing I can feel is this all-encompassing numbness in every cell of my being, this internal order to cease all activity. There is not much sadness. No pain, nor guilt, nothing quite so prickly. Only a blanket that lands on me softly and lets me know how tired I am by contrast.

A slight buzz in my ears as I finally get up and go to the water. The light switch. Where is the light switch, a small thought pops into my head, timid, pleading. But the water is so cold, and I don't care. Too numb, not enough to lose by letting myself be enveloped in the numbing cold, too much life unlived that I cannot live for myself, and the water is up to my chest almost and I don't know what I want to do -

I don't want to die.

I just don't want to live.

Not like this.

But I don't want to die.

And I don't want to live.

But -

It's a conundrum I don't have time to solve, because the waves are lapping over my ears and mouth now and it's very real, real enough to startle me. I remember I can't swim very well. Suddenly, it's night all around me and I don't want to die _right now_.

I try to double back, but a wave takes hold of me and twists me over and around until I am not sure which way is up or down. My previous life as a fighter breaks surface before I do.

Somehow I manage to live.

* * *

If I were to look down on me from a vantage point in the sky, overcast as it is and dark, I would see a dark-haired woman on her stomach being kissed by the waves that are trying to claim her back to their wet embrace. She is struggling, up and away, her clothes dragging in the sand, her eyes fierce and sad.

A small, well-built man, who has just anchored and tied his boat to the jetty, is cautiously lowering a basket to the ground. He hears the woman letting out sobs as she claws herself to safety, walks over to her, eventually looks down on her.

"Shit, Mikasa, what made you think that'd help?" Levi says, offering a hand.

If I were looking down on me from some vantage point way up above, I would stop and come back to my body now. The feeling has come back too, the numbness broken by the waves into bite-sized morsels I am swallowing hungrily. I take his hand, then pull him down sharply. He tries to keep his balance, but he has been startled and topples over, lands by my side. I drag him by the shirt a couple of feet higher, where the waves can't take us, and he lets me straddle him.

He looks nonplussed, but his muscles are taut where I can feel them. I can't tell what he's thinking. Right now, it's not about him though. Fuck him. This is about me, being someone who is not me. I would like to be reborn in anger and sex, please.

"This won't help either," he says quietly.

There is nothing gentle in the way I am handling him when I lift his jaw to stare at the darkness down the side of his throat, nothing romantic when I start to pull apart the strings of his linen shirt. It's all energy in one place. Without direction.

"Can I just have this moment?"

Can I try to do as living people do? Live as someone who is decidedly _not_ Mikasa. And then - why am I am asking permission, I think - and who am I asking it of? "I'll have this moment, and it won't mean anything, okay?" I say again. Because how can it mean anything, Levi, other person, person who is not me, when I don't know how to make _anything_ have meaning for myself? Yet, there is energy within me and within this other person who is so like me and so foreign at the same time, it makes me dizzy. There is some energy between us too. Play with the energy, bounce it back and forth - and I am rocking back and forth on his lap - why him, I can't tell - when he says, "I'm not going to stop you." And he's careful about it, as if he's unsure but not more unsure about everything else he's unsure about.

It's all right, I think as I go through the motions of taking off only the necessary layers of clothing to make this happen. This is new me. A casual sex goddess. A young woman breezing through life, hungry for fun. Hungry for cock. Not a thought in her mind, yet slightly deranged. I am someone who sees nothing vulnerable in the way his breath quickens when I push off his bermuda shorts, nothing apprehensive in the tiniest tremble of his hand travelling flush up my thigh, circling over the soft, supple inside, skirting lightly past where my thighs meet, tracing the outline of my navel. I don't notice how he seems just a little terrified when our eyes meet as I lean closer and closer, and I've taken him in my hand and I am stroking him and he's growing eager despite the downward turn of his lips, despite us being who we are.

Despite everything on this moonless night, me dripping freezing wet over him, the distance wavering between us as I feel us both try not to fall in it. I resolve not to kiss him. Nor touch him very much at all. In three seconds flat, I have parted my lips down below, and I've pushed him inside me. On one hand it's unthinkable, on the other it's just nature, and nature takes no names. It's like I have the power to make myself better, and I ride him haphazardly first, breathless and a bit awkward, then he rises to meet me and his hands clasp my waist and hip to guide me, and my hands claw on his shoulder and forearm to hold me steady and him away. I do, I keep him away at first, then I make the mistake of looking at him, really looking, and he is wearing the strangest expression like he also wishes he could ride the pleasure to more. More.

What more? I don't know, but he is kind of beautiful like this. Our bodies do their own thing, physical beings that we both are, and soon there are noises, soft and sharp and drawn out, and our hands are getting more adventurous, I can't stop it. I am wavering past the distance. He feels surprisingly real. Surprisingly firm, yet gentle. His skin is surprisingly lush against my own. We sweat and struggle together like a twist on the training days of old; did I say this would just be sex? What is just sex, I think, as I kiss his mouth and it's the moment when two strangers who have always thought of each other as strangers, unthinkable to break down these barriers, crash together and know each other. It's magical, it makes me almost cry with intimacy. I don't understand how someone can be so solid and warm, with me. For me.

Can I-

Can I really take someone for myself like this? After trying every which way find to comfort, this feels like cheating.

I want to bring him closer, and we kiss deeper and we're panicking so we hug tightly. It's growing out of control. Whereas before he was contained, now he is spilling forth his own bullshit feelings, his insecurities and this and that - is this guilt? Is that joy? Excitement? - he is tangling his hands in my hair and he's thrown me over and he is all over me like I'm the secret to a good, long life.

And maybe I am, too.

* * *

Oh. Oh god, is this what it feels like to soar - is this the real vantage point?

* * *

The aftermath smells like him, a spicy clean earthiness.

I didn't know it would be like this.

We are both terrified now, I can tell. But he keeps his arms around me, and before I can cry or visibly panic, he has the sense to squeeze me tight. I end up laughing a little.

* * *

After my most terrible brilliant idea, things got confusing. I didn't know how much I was craving it until it happened. And when it happened, I didn't know if what made it so intimate was him and I, or if intimacy was inherent in sex.

I worked harder than ever before, content to do so. My nightmares also quieted down, and I did not melt into numbness again. Eventually, as the days passed and I saw Levi come and go but studiously avoided his inquiring gaze, the inkling of a new sort of tightness grew in me. It was still not compelling enough to face him.

So passed most of spring.

* * *

Picture this.

It's Jean's wedding day. We have all donned our best clothes, made sure the children are washed behind the ears, their hair combed neatly. The arch is in the middle of the orphanage courtyard, by the kitchen garden, and it's interspersed with heavy cream and yellow roses. Their scent fills the air, and there is a certain giddiness that comes with it, and the lantern lights, and the soothing warmth of a breezy summer night in good company.

Once the ceremony is over, I go with the others to congratulate the happy couple. Hitch is the most beautiful bride I have ever seen. Jean gives everyone a timid little grin, like he can't believe his good luck, except he doesn't grin at me. He is a little somber and his eyes are wide, but I nod, because I am happy for him. I know I would have been lucky to end up with Jean, but I was never quite so sure he would have been as lucky to end up with me. I pull him into a hug and squeeze. "I'm so happy you found each other," I say to him. "I'm so happy to know you." Hitch whacks him lightly over the head, and we break apart, grinning. Connie hoots.

The band starts playing a slow song and Jean takes his bride's hand and they both saunter to the grassy dancefloor, where they spin in circles and into each other's eyes. It calms me to see them like that.

I hum along as I go to the drinks stand, pour myself some wine. Never have I seen such a soft light buzzing on all of my friends' faces, like fireflies, never have I felt so light myself, or at least, not that I can recall. I get the urge to talk to all of them, ask Connie how he's been faring with the woodworking, if he still has all his fingers, play with Historia's kids and tease her for being such a Queen, and feign interest in Hanji's exploits until I realize that what she's saying really is interesting and try to pay more attention. I want to talk to Levi. But I'm not sure how to do any of these things yet, and I'm anxious.

A lovely sad song is playing.

 _And the ground has been slowly pulling us back down_

 _You see it on both our skin_

 _We get a few years and then it wants us back_

There is a sunflower towering over the garden fence. I take my drink and go say hi. It's my own sunflower, evidently of a giant variety, that has grown healthy and strong. It's a little sun in a solar system of its own. I caress one of its soft petals and it reminds me a little of something - of skin against my own, perhaps. Where is he, I wonder, and it doesn't take a lot of looking for him, as if my eyes are drawn to him, as if there is an invisible thread there.

He is sitting, ankle on knee, impeccably dressed in a tux whose fresh laundering I imagine I can smell from here, talking to the people at his table. There are a couple of girls - girls his size, I note with some unpleasantness - that seem hanging from his lips, and I can't imagine why, because he's not an animated talker. I almost want to make him dance with me so that he feels small in comparison and gets embarrassed. It's a devious little thought. I'm so glad I can have it.

 _It would be a hundred times easier_

 _If we were young again_

 _But as it is_

 _And it is_

"You kept it!" a child says excitedly. His name is Martin, I know now, and he gave me the sunflower in the first place. His friends are playing nearby, that is how he must have seen me.

"Of course I kept him. We're friends now," I say, smiling.

He puts out his arms in uncontained excitement and fires off, "He was right! You see, I didn't really think it was great idea, actually, I thought you'd throw it away and tell me off and mark me down but you kept it and made friends with it and you are nice now -"

"Wait, wait, hold up," I say. "Who was right?"

"The mister who gave it to me and told me to give to you."

"I didn't know of any such person," I note, a little too intensely, but I don't want to scare him, so I force an indifference over me.

"Eh, it's not like I could have got in on my own in the first place," he points out. "They never let us out." This part is true enough, we do keep a firm hand on them, so I wonder how I've never thought of this plot hole before.

 _To think that we could stay the same_

 _To think that we could stay the same_

 _To think that we could stay the same_

"And who was this mysterious sunflower benefactor?"

He seems confused, so I rectify, "who gave you the plant, Martin?"

"It's a secret."

"Not anymore it isn't," I say. "We're talking about it."

This is a valid argument for Martin. He shuffles his feet a little, then spills the beans.

"It was the short guy, with the fish and the berries and stuff sometimes. The one who used to fight a lot. He said to give this to you because you looked too miserable to be near children without something of your own to kill in private. Or something like that. It was weird."

"Thanks, Martin," I say and pat his head. I down my wine, take a breath, and consider the fact that I am alive. I have lived to this day, this moment. I think the water may have made the shallowest path over the stone, barely fit for ants, but it's there. I can see it. Trace it with my fingers.

"Also, don't be a tattle-tale," I finally tell the boy, before I turn and walk over to Levi's table.

 _But we're two slow dancers, last ones out_

 _We're two slow dancers, last ones out_

 _Two slow dancers, last ones out_

He is in the middle of a conversation I am none too sorry to interrupt. There is so much I can think to say, to ask, to demand, to explain, to explore, as I read his reservation and some guarded hope unfurling in him, hope that what? - that what, Levi?

* * *

"Dance with me?" is what I end up saying.


End file.
